ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Liberal and Hugoton are two communities being targeted as part of a survey to help an area community foundation gain a deeper understanding of its local priorities.
The Western Kansas Community Foundation’s “Our Community, Our Future,” survey which will also be aimed at Cimarron and Lakin, is part of an initiative signaling a new strategy for WKCF in its efforts to serve Southwest Kansas.
Foundation Community Development Coordinator Bailey Sater said historically, most of the work the organization has done in communities is through grant making and scholarships, and the survey is part of a new step for WKCF.
“We’ve never done anything like this,” she said. “We’ve never gone out into the communities in our 15-county service area and gotten to know what are the issues that are pressing to them in their communities. This is our first real effort to hear from the people.”
Sater was hired as the community development coordinator about a year ago to help take WKCF’s mission outside of Garden City, where it has traditionally been focused.
“We’ve always served those 15 counties, but the hiring of myself and this initiative encompasses a new effort to get out there and become a regional community foundation rather than one that’s just focused in Garden City and serves them through grants,” she said. “We’ve always served communities through grants for Haskell County, Morton County or any of our other counties. We’ve always provided grants to non-profits in those areas, but this is the first time we’ve really gone in there.”
Sater said she and WKCF Director Conny Bogaard did a series of community tours, meeting with several people, including Liberal Chamber of Commerce Director Rozelle Webb and leaders from the Liberal Area Coalition for Families.
“We got to know more about the community,” she said. “We asked, ‘What can you tell us about Liberal? What can you tell us about this community?’ This is a step after that.”
Though the foundation’s name is Western Kansas, its service area only goes as far north as Greeley County, Wichita County, Scott County and Lane County. Sater said another foundation serves Northwest Kansas.
“There is a Greater Northwest Community Foundation, and they serve most of those counties,” she said. “There are other community foundations all over Kansas.”
Sater said she and Bogaard learned much from their community tours.
“Our board and our development committee measured where we wanted to go,” Sater said. “We wanted to start based on a good mix of demographics.”
Of the four communities chosen for the survey, Liberal was the largest, and along with WKCF having no footprint in Liberal, this made it a smart choice for the survey. She added the three remaining communities were spread out geographically across Southwest Kansas, and much of the decision process had to do with community readiness and the foundation’s historical footprint in a community.
“We wanted to pick areas we didn’t know a lot about, but we were confident because we have some really good community leadership existing in that community,” she said.
Bogaard said the survey is simple yet ambitious.
“We want to better understand how communities are thinking,” she said. “The survey will help us to get a better picture and truly know what communities want and and need we need more engagement with the people living in those communities.”
Bogaard said by the end of the day, WKCF hopes to not only have a better understanding of local needs, but also to build new partnerships to work on solutions together.
“The way we will do that will largely depend on the responses we receive from the survey,” she said.
Sater said foundation leaders hope to make a bigger impact in Southwest Kansas with what the survey will provide for them.
“The funding we have for this opportunity, we have some discretionary money set aside from this from a grant we received, and it’s quite a bit larger than our typical granting amount we give to non-profits,” she said. “We’re hoping to diversify the way we serve communities.”
In the past, most of WKCF’s grants have gone exclusively to non-profits, but with “Our Community, Our Future,” Sater said the foundation wants to bring in multiple stakeholders such as small businesses, educational entities, hospitals, community groups and government.
“We want to bring in everybody to come up with a project for proposal,” she said.
The survey is open to any individual who is a member of the Liberal, Hugoton, Cimarron or Lakin communities as employees, students or residents.
“We want to bring everyone in and make sure everyone’s voice is heard,” Sater said. “We hear mostly from non-profits. We hear what non-profits are experiencing, but what are small businesses experiencing? What are people who work in the school districts experiencing? What are the problems they are seeing? This project, its scope is much wider than our traditional grant focus, so we hope to make an impact that can make a nice next step in our mission in community development.”
While some of the survey is about the people themselves, Sater said primarily, the foundation is looking for what Southwest Kansans want in their communities.
“We want to know what are some things you have in your community but would like to improve?” she said. “How is your community serving you, and how can it get better?”
The “Our Community, Our Future” initiative offers a new and unique approach to community service outside of the traditional grant making processes of a community foundation, and the survey empowers residents in directing resources to address what they view as local needs.
The survey is available in English and Spanish and takes about five to 10 minutes to complete.
“It’s pretty quick, and we like to keep this survey pretty general to allow for some diverse responses,” Sater said. “A lot of it is ranked and opened to fill out. There’s a lot of areas for writing, and you can write business conditions. It’s completely anonymous. If you take it online, I have a Google document where I can see the results. I can filter by community, but it’s totally anonymous.”
Interested participants can access the survey online through the Western Kansas Community Foundation’s Facebook page and at wkcf.org. Print copies of the survey can be picked up at the public library in each community.
Sater said WKCF encourages every community member, high school age and older, in Liberal and Hugoton to complete the survey and provide insight and perspective that will create opportunities to positively impact their community.
“We wanted to allow an area for people who are interested in getting involved to help us promote these surveys,” she said. “We have had several people provide us their e-mails, and we’ve gotten in touch and thanked them for taking the survey. If they would like to volunteer, please take this to people you know. Anyone can fill it out. We’re looking for any and all responses. We want to get a good representation of your community.”
This is the first year WKCF has done the survey, and Sater said discussions with consultants said the aim for Lakin, Cimarron and Hugoton is at least 75 responses. With Liberal being bigger, though, the foundation is looking for at least 125 responses from that community.
“As many as we can get would be great, and it might take some time to build on this, to get people to recognize who we are, what the survey will do for them,” she said.
Sater said the survey has already seen some responses.
“We’ve got about 20 to 30 from Liberal, and most of that’s from the LACF group,” she said. “We launched it, and there was an LACF meeting that week.”
Sater was at Liberal Memorial Library last week, and she plans to be in Liberal again this week.
“I’ll meet with any and all people,” she said. “I’ll do remote office hours for people who are curious about the survey. I will be going to the senior center to drop off some paper copies. The library, I plan on using to become a hub. If people want to take a paper copy, they can simply drop it off at the library, and I’ll pick it up.”
Sater said WKCF officials are working hard to get the word out about the survey.
“We have some targeted ads running in each community,” she said. “We’ve put it out in our newspaper. We’ve sent it out to our existing contacts within Liberal and the other communities. Remote office hours are another strategy to meet people one on one where they’re at. “
Sater said overall, the foundation is looking to target community leaders and champions and their network of other community members.
“You see a lot of so and so population,” she said. “Would you be willing to take this to them – a school district or a senior center? We have lots of different things going on to get as many as possible. For each community, we value anyone who has a good contact with the younger community and the Spanish-speaking population. That leadership is important to connect with as well.”
Although the survey is aimed at community members in Liberal, Lakin, Cimarron and Hugoton, Sater said those living outside those towns can also participate.
“You might not live in Liberal,” she said. “You might live just outside of Liberal, or you spend most of your time in Liberal. If they use the services and they’re part of that community, they can absolutely take the survey.”
Survey responses will be collected through June to be followed by community discussion and gathering in each of the surveyed communities, and Sater said that deadline may be extended depending on the number of responses.
“This summer, we will spend most of the time compiling,” she said. “If someone fills this out by paper, I have to input these all by hand. Throughout July and August, I’ll be compiling, and we’ll be putting it all into a report.”
Sater said once that report is in place, findings will be presented at community meetings in the fall.
“I think we outlined September as our goal,” she said. “We don’t have dates yet, but we’re also going to spend those two months in the summer planning that fall community gathering.”
Sater said WKCF seeks to bring together people from various sectors, including non-profits, businesses, health care, government, education and the general public to discuss potential solutions.
“The community gatherings are designed to help bring everyone together on the same page,” she said. “Let’s say Liberal came up with more child care as their top issue. Child care was your top issue. We would issue people who came to that community gathering to create a coalition to work together to come up with a funding proposal, application or whatever that looks like, and it’ll come through our committee to review it and go from there. We really hope those community gatherings will mobilize you all so you’re not relying on a particular non-profit to do the load of the grant writing.”
With community dialogue expected to take place in September, Sater said WKCF will announce additional funding opportunities for each community.
“We don’t want to be seen as directing this,” she said. “We want to help convene people. Another role for a community foundation is to be a convener of various interests. We have a foot in the finance world. We have a foot in the non-profit world. We really want to bring all of those interests together to get multi-sector partnerships to get something like child care done.”
No matter the proposal a community comes up with, Sater said WKCF will find a way to partner with that funding opportunity.
“They’ve got a day care up in Leoti, and we did something that was not very common in the history of our organization,” she said. “We were the fiscal sponsor for them so they were able to get a lone from Wheatland. That is a way we have acted outside of that traditional grant making.”
Sater said the foundation likewise has a holding company.
“We have a couple donors come to us who want to give us their land,” she said. “How do we do that? We have a holdings company, and we use the proceeds from that farm land we have for our grant making.”
Sater said these are just two examples of how WKCF partners to help get a project done that falls outside of the foundation’s traditional grant making and focus on non-profits.
“We’re really keeping it wide and open because we want a lot of people to have room to be creative with what they come up with,” she said.